Another presidential candidate proposes to make college debt-free, what will Hillary do?

Martin O'Malley with poses with ‘Rainbow the Macaw,’ who will probably not have any education loans.

By

JillianBerman

Reporter

Under President Martin O’Malley, Americans could graduate from college without any debt, the Democratic candidate announced Wednesday, raising the pressure on Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton to reveal her plans to make college more affordable.

A few months after endorsing the idea of debt-free college in a Washington Post op-ed, O’Malley provided more specifics on how he would provide all Americans with access to a debt-free degree within five years at any public college or university while campaigning at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm College on Wednesday.

O’Malley’s campaign framed the former governor’s commitment to make college more affordable as a personal one, sending an email Tuesday night to O’Malley supporters from his daughter Grace, who took on student debt to go to college and became a public school teacher. O’Malley and his wife have $339,200 worth of debt as a result of using Parent PLUS loans — a program that allows parents with good credit to take out loans from the federal government to help their kids pay for college — to send their two daughters to school.

“When it came time for me to go to college, I had to make a tough choice: do I go to the college we can afford or do I take out loans to go to the college of my dreams?” Grace wrote in the e-mail to supporters. “At the age of 18, I made the decision to follow my dreams. My family and I now face years of debt — and we know we’re not the only ones.”

O’Malley’s plan includes a variety of proposals popularized by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, and others, including allowing current borrowers to refinance their loans at lower interest rates and raising limits on Pell Grants — a program that provides free money from the federal government to help low-income students pay for college. But he also introduced proposals that haven’t been discussed broadly on the national stage, such as tying tuition at public colleges and universities to the median income of the state where the school is located, increasing access to affordable child care on campus and allowing borrowers with private loans to enter into income-based payment programs.

Currently only borrowers with federal student loans have guaranteed access to plans that allow them to make payments based on their income. Under O’Malley’s proposal, private borrowers could enter into these plans as well and pay the federal government instead of their bank.

Hillary Clinton hasn’t formally endorsed the idea of debt-free college and she’s expected to unveil her college affordability agenda in mid-July. Still, the former Secretary of State hinted that there could be a debt-free component to her plan, telling Iowa voters in May that officials have “to try to move toward making college as debt-free as possible.”

If O’Malley became president, he would call on states to do the same. His plan includes proposals to freeze public school tuition and use federal dollars to incentivize states to reinvest in higher education by matching their funding with federal grants. Experts cite declining state funding for higher education as a major reason for the rising cost of college.

O’Malley aids declined to specify the cost of the governor’s plan, noting that it would vary depending on the levels of state funding already in place. The former governor is weighing several options for covering the cost of the plan, including taxing investment income, which wealthier households are more likely to benefit from, at the same rate as earned income and raising taxes on companies that ship jobs overseas.

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